I was a designer lamp

… and didn't I look good?

Found at republic café in Salzburg's old city.

At the crossroads (Robert Johnson)

Legal or not, let's have another (Google) street view of the RR Xing at BG OH, thinking of slow trains coming (Bob Dylan), of the crossroads where Robert Johnson might or might not have met the Devil in the late 1920s, thinking of a great Austrian-Australian musician by the name of Chris Schermer, and of our mutual acquaintance, Czech-born fingerstyle guitarist Sammy Vomacka, thinking of Austrian fingerpicker Peter Ratzenbeck, and finally thinking of guitar genius Harri Stojka (they're all geniuses, but there's got to be some variation language-wise) – you might wonder, why have I heard of the one or the other but never of the rest?

Well, there's no business like show business: there might be people of equal artistic stature, but some never reach the fame (or fortune) of others …

Those life- and streetwise among us know, you won't need the Beatles or mother Mary to teach you: Let it be!

Posted with two special dedications:

To

Djedje – taxi-driving heavy metal paramedic of Palestine origins

and to

Martin – guitar pickin', foot-stompin', hyperactive waiter at republic café, who's had a beer with late jazzer Joe Zawinul at Finkenstein way back in another lifetime.

God (whoever that may be) bless them all!

wemo

An aside from the blogwart: wemo isn't ashamed to be purely & simply a fan at certain times of his life.

Take it or leave it, as you will.

"You're so vain …"

"… you probably think this blog is about you, don't you?"

Soundtrack by Carly Simon,

with background vocals by Mick Jagger

wemo & the blogwart have strictly refused to accept any association with this post,

image or text.

So be it!

Loop-di-doo

"Infinity in a finite object" …?

Now, with the blog theorist gone on a sabbatical,

the blogwart still trying to link (Lacan's) jouissance to Candle in the wind,

while trying to disperse any far-fetched associations to "Life is hard and then you die" (see below on the blog),

while holding back the the tears 'cause for reasons unknown The Righteous Brothers' "You've lost that loving feeling" came to his inner ear,

with the sound technician working on a re-loop of some of Neil Young's greatest guitar feedback (Arc / Weld, and more) tracks – and somewhere, in the back of his head, someone in an unknown audience is screaming 'Tar Babies', strange, but true,

and the back office crew once again in a meeting or gone fishing (one in a synthetic fur coat, one took an ice-pick along to the frozen lake),

wemo practicing his tractor skills as a 4-year old,

gaffers, riggers a.s.f. applied, but were never called back,

sadly, there's no-one around to comment this incredible screen-shot except for the blogger's knee, but, alas once more, that never has been very outspoken …

The photograph on this post is best looped – correction: viewed! – on a Mac with Mac OS X 10.4

in brushed aluminum design.

As so very often, nobody will accept any responsibility for the external links on this post.

Letzte Meldung:

Während wir die Ausdünnung unseres Blogteams bedauern, hat sich ein junger, vorwiegend deutschsprachiger Praktikant bei uns gemeldet, dzt möchte er noch anonym bleiben.

Vom blogwart freundlichst begrüsst, sei er doch ein Student von Klaus Theweleit in Freiburg, mit einem interessanten Diss-Thema:

'Anti-Ödipus verlinkt. Der Blogger und das Internet als Wunschmaschine.' –

Hm, zumindest der blogwart findet das interessant und schickt dem blog theorist gerade ein SMS.

Die back-office-crew fand ihn 'vielversprechend, aber verwirrt', und hat zur Sicherheit eine Flasche Wein aufgemacht.

Der Sound technician wiederum legt etwas Albert Ayler auf, altes Vinyl, was weiß ein Fremder, und das mag er wieder, der Jungspund. Naja, mal sehen. Wir sind da nicht so!

Wer hat das jetzt hingeschrieben – wo doch außerm Knie keiner mehr da ist?

Hard surfaces

"Life is hard and then you die."

Just a quote – from 1980s (?) band It's Immaterial. Nothing to do with anyone round here.

Says the blogwart.

Happy New Year! – and an announcement

With the blog theorist currently on a sabbatical – for his ground-breaking study on Multiple Blog Personality Disorder Syndrome (wonder why he took so many notes round here recently?) – well, for the moment we'll have to miss out on his little lecture that would have been due right here & now: 'Auto-referentiality in post-modernism 2.0 and the doppelganger motif in German Black Romanticism in the light of Jacques Lacan's concept of the 'Real' as opposed to traditional symbolic theories and their concept of the Sublime'.

Once he's back, we'll love to get that slim 2 hour tour package to a theater near you!

Got a sneak preview of his manuscript: barely 200 footnotes there, easy stuff, yet enlightening, especially with his newly developed multi media presentation system.

As a little preparation work you might just brush up your Lacan: still familiar with the concepts of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic – jouissance?

As for the practical applications you might just want to re-read Slavoi Zizek's 5 volumes on Lacanian analysis of Hitchcock movies; then work out your questions for the discussion: it will be mostly on the implications of web 2.0 for the theory of the Imaginary, and why Schubert's 'Doppelgänger' was a predecessor of the discussion of identity and loss in The Matrix.

Sheet music will be available at the doors!

Come to think of it: it might just add that extra something to your enjoyment/jouissance, if you also read wemo's thesis on Matrix beforehand; it's based on an unreleased editor's cut that was destroyed by the production company's law firm shortly afterwards. wemo was slightly injured in the incident, and a doppelganger of the film editor has been haunting some 50.000 copies of Gibson's Neuromancer ever since. The effect is especially gruesome in the e-book versions; watch out before download!

wemo's thesis available at Salzburg University Press, Salzamt division, 500p., € 250.00 or $ 325.00 incl. VAT, postage and packaging not included.

I'll just take it for granted that you're familiar with Kant's three Critiques, those two compact volumes of Deleuze's theory on cinema, and Karl Sierek's theory of the visual paradigm as developed in passing in his analysis of Blade Runner, a lot of basics there in that little essay, not to be missed; – you're with me, aren't you?

There will be handouts in Sanskrit, for reasons to become clear during the lecture (it's got to be about Zen and the perception of 'reality', hasn't it? Just an educated guess there; let's see).

All set? Then: Happy New Year! Signed Mister Mister, blogwart

still no-one knows where you've gone to

source: Mozilla Firefox, screenshot Apple & wemo

I'd love to see that visualized: a request that is diverted in a way it never can be ended.
Would it look like that Moebius strip that you could walk along covering either side of that band without having to 'switch' sides ever … infinity in a finite object.

Ostinato

As a 4 year old, yours truly is reported to have taken his parents on endless 'train rides' along the square pavement patterns of St. Marcus Square, Venice Italy. The journey ended nowhere, as the pattern would lead back into itself.

Maybe the first loop in this looped career.

For today let it be the loops of Burning Spears Ethiopians on the album quoted below.

Introducing the team / Imprint

wemo: reflective photographer, blog editor, no further details available

Sound technician: Dr. Mr. Hammerhead, LlD, Bsc, Hon. Prof. at Loops Technologies® Labs, Inc.

Blog theorist: Mr. Dr. Hammerhead, MD, PhD, Life Univ., Jane Austin TX

Production facilities: Canon Ixus & blogger@google.com

Archives: iPhoto, Cupertino CA & Ice Cube, Salzburg, Austria

Maintenance work: Apple Europe, Cork, Ireland, EU

Blog administration: Mister Mister, Associate Prof. for Blog studies at iLife® Univ., Apple, N. Y. – a.k.a. 'Blogwart'.

Irresponsible & tasteless puns by the backoffice crew, unless supplied by external links; then it's, highly more poetic: James Joyce Finnegan's Wake

All characters on this blog are entirely fictitious.

Stage hands, electricians, gaffers & riggers will be booked on location. Feel free to apply!

After your application, please note: Don't call us, we call you.

Trance, or GOD is a Sound System

Sounds from the Burning Spear. Soul Jazz Records presents Studio 1 recordings by Burning Spear. SJR CD 101

It has been argued that GOD in the middle ages was SOUND. The sound of ringing bells over the villages and towns, bells to be heard in the forests far away from the villages. Music, church music, Gregorian chanting, organs filling the church space, resounding in the bodies of the believers.

Live sounds, no recordings whatsoever. It is now or never.

Imagine a black man from Jamaica, known as the Burning Spear.

take #1) I imagine him at a microphone in something like a speaker's cabin. No reverb, absolutely 'dry' acoustics. He is not singing, he is 'speaking', not rapping or toasting.

take #2) I imagine him with an electric bass, recording one single 'sound' that might become the back beat for Swellheaded. "Run, run, run, I will never run away".

take #3) I imagine him with a guitar doing that simple 'shuffle' that was to become the back bone of what is called roots reggae nowadays. Did he do it for hours together with a rhythm section? Did he do it for minutes by himself in the studio?

take #4) The Burning Spear at his sound system. Four tracks, eight tracks? I do not know, it doesn't matter. GOD matters, and GOD appears in the mixing process.

The Burning Spear of today is a wise, friendly old man, an eccellent live musician. Seemingly detached except for some addresses to the audience he presides a 'band', a rhythm sound machine, eine Wunschmaschine, a system that seems to function like a machinery, cog wheels connected by an invisible hand. Miles Davis's electric bands come to mind, early Talking Heads, James Brown's Jungle Groove. In this music, GOD is always nearby, no matter what 'contents' or 'message' may be involved, no matter what 'private' personality may have been involved with a man like James Brown.

Jah blessings, for an appointment with his majesty.

The only way is up?

Eclipse / Finsternis

Bonnie Tyler's Total eclipse of the heart – to me it always was 'grand opera'. Maybe it's something different; I've tried this in German:

Oper – oder die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist des Schmachtfetzens

„Every now and then I get a little bit lonely“

Die Geburt der Tragödie: eine Schauspielerin tritt aus dem Chor, diesem gegenüber.

Ein Ich wendet sich an ein Größeres. Und beide sind Teil des einen Weltgeistes Herz und Schmerz.

Tylers Spiel geht weiter: Wie eine zweite Leadstimme, mal vor, mal hinter Tyler gemischt, vielleicht sie selbst: das „turn around, bright eyes“. Also: Schauspielerin, Chor, eine zweite ‚innere’ Stimme – und die Sehnsucht nach dem Blick…

Wissen wir, ob die Augen strahlen, bevor der Blick uns trifft? Aber wenn, und wenn vielleicht ein erlösendes Wort gesprochen würde: „Here’s looking at you, kid“, dann…

Lassen wir die großen Worte:

„Every now and then I fall apart“

Black.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik ist in diversen Re-releases im gutsortierten Handel erhältlich.

Bonnie Tyler: Total eclipse of the heart 1983; Lyrics Jim Steinman; auf zahlreichen Greatest-Hits-Compilations

What is quoted here is copyrighted material; don't copy, rip or download without paying the dues to artists, producers and distributers!

Sign

May all our roads be signposted as nicely as these hiking-paths on Gaisberg near Salzburg city. And may always be crossed knives and forks be as close by as here.

Sign: "Sign the picture, sign the picture, sign the picture and throw it away!" For those music-diggers and gold-miners among you:

Peter Hammill & the K-Group live: The Margin. Hamburg, Line Records 1985.

Peter Hammill has a new album out, good to hear from him after so many years!